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Estimating the diversity of tropical anurans in fragmented landscapes with acoustic monitoring: lessons from a sampling sufficiency perspective

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Abstract

Determining the distribution and abundance of populations is the first step toward assessing biodiversity conservation status. This step is based on field observations that are largely influenced by the sampling method employed. Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) are tools developed to improve species monitoring that employ acoustic communication. Although largely employed, the efforts required to achieve good diversity estimates with this technique are still unknown. We investigate the use of ARUs in estimating species richness of anuran assemblages in a tropical region, aiming to determine the sampling sufficiency of species richness at local and regional levels, analyze whether the asymptote point is related to forest cover, and investigate the influence of subsampling type over time on species richness estimates. We monitored amphibians in 14 streams embedded in landscapes representing a gradient from 20 to 70% native forest coverage. We detected a total of 14 species, with the regional sampling sufficiency of total species richness reached in 3448 min and influenced mainly by the terrestrial species’ presence. Forest coverage had no influence on the minimum audio processing time required to achieve local asymptote. The subsampling schemes (temporally stratified and randomly assigned) had similar efficiency when using 5 min/h or more sample efforts. Our findings indicate that passive acoustic monitoring can adequately represent local anuran richness, focusing especially on the arboreal guild. Sampling effort can be optimized, with a 5 min/h duty cycle being sufficient to recover detection of most species, saving up to 75% of the effort devoted to auditing the acoustic dataset.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, PRA, upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all farmers and landowners that generously supported the fieldwork. We also thank R. Souza, C. Loiola, and B. Vitorino for their assistance during the surveys. Permission to conduct biodiversity surveys was granted by the Brazilian Ministry of Environment (permit #51502-2). PRA thanks C.O. Gussoni for fruitful discussions on conservation. PRA was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brazil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. LSMS acknowledges grant PEJ2018-004603-A from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad.

Funding

PRA was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brazil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001. LSMS was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad, grant PEJ2018-004603-A.

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Contributions

PRA, MCR, and LMTC conceived the ideas and the study design. PRA and LSMS reviewed the original ideas and hypotheses. PRA acquired field data and analyzed the acoustic data. FM curated the sound data. PRA and LSMS analyzed the data and wrote the results. PRA led the original draft and LSMS reviewed all drafts. All authors consented to the final draft.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paula Ribeiro Anunciação.

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No animals were collected or sacrificed in this study.

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Communicated by Dirk Sven Schmeller.

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Anunciação, P.R., Sugai, L.S.M., Martello, F. et al. Estimating the diversity of tropical anurans in fragmented landscapes with acoustic monitoring: lessons from a sampling sufficiency perspective. Biodivers Conserv 31, 3055–3074 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02475-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02475-w

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